


Logically, It's Impossible.

by PoliticallyObsessedScholar



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Susan POV, Susan Pevensie - Freeform, The Problem of Susan, what if Susan was right?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 22:13:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12142212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoliticallyObsessedScholar/pseuds/PoliticallyObsessedScholar
Summary: The problem with Susan is that she thinks too much.I mean, logically, it’s impossible,she said when she encountered a talking beaver once, in a dream within a dream.





	Logically, It's Impossible.

The problem with Susan is that she thinks too much.  _I mean, logically, it’s impossible,_  she said when she encountered a talking beaver once, in a dream within a dream. 

“Feelings and emotions!” she scoffed when Lucy came to her, all of sixteen years old and filled with the zeal of the acolyte, “It’s far too easy to be led astray if you rely on  _that”_

Edmund came to her next, serious face and eternally self-flagellating himself for what he thinks he did at ten years old in the middle of two wars. “Logic can get all twisted around too, Su. You can justify anything if you try hard enough” 

She’d looked at him then, turned away from the mirror and really looked at him. “Yes, but I’m not trying to justify anything, I’m trying to interrogate it and find out what’s true. There’s a marked difference.”

She went out in skirts that made her mother clutch at her pearls in horror. She paints her lips bright red and accepts invitations to parties. She’d known, even as a child, that you could be clever and be a girl. Hadn’t she imagined herself the commander of armies and planner of parties? Hadn’t she imagined herself as both strategist and the face that would launch a thousand ships?

Lucy darted around with a younger set, a fiercer set. She sees her reflection in the women crowding around throwing away makeup and talking about how during the war they drove cars and kept up the home front. Why would they bother with such silly vapid interests as make-up and parties.

Susan thinks about them sometimes as she makes her way into the houses of politicians, simpers and laughs until they let down their guard and then as she pours wine from crystal bottles dazzles them with some intelligent insight, leaving them poleaxed.

Do those girls like Lucy really think their war is won on the battlefield? In marches and protests and the rejection of anything men prize in their women? Oh they need the women who will storm into university and sit beneath patronising male professors. They need the women who agitated for the vote. They need the women who will damn everyone who tells them no.

They also need the women like her. Everyday Mata Hari’s who give the lie to every myth a man thinks about them. They can be clever and beautiful. Vibrant and alive at a party, or solemn and serious when the situation calls for it. The woman leaning over a man’s shoulder to advise him to give into their cause so that, one day, it’s a woman seated incontrovertible on the throne.

Peter came to her once, fiercely academic and paternal. He tried to tell her to “stop this nonsense, Susan. You know perfectly well that it’s true, you’re upsetting Lucy.” Well, he would be that sure of himself wouldn’t he? What with a Professor from Oxford writing him a nice little letter of recommendation and giving him private tutoring while she went to America. Walking straight from school into Magdelan College and from there into a government position, every inch the High King they’d styled him.

Except, Susan had also been exiled in that house with its books and distant father figure. She’d studied just as hard, stolen his book list when he left it on the table. She could interrogate the Platonic Ideal with the best of them, recite Shakespeare like she rose reborn from Ophelia’s stream, and she could do it in French too if you wanted. 

Queen Susan the Gentle they called her and sure she’s gentle until the time comes to stop. To drop that simpering mask and sink the knife into Rabadash’s gut. Which is what she should have done the first time but she was so young, playing at being an adult.

She worries about the group of them - Jill who she didn’t know well, Cousin Eustace, Edmund, Lucy, and Peter - who’d gather in that old house weekly to talk about some mystical, magical, land and try summoning a divine lion of all things as proof of truth. Talking animals, endless winter, sentient trees and they accepted it all? Looking at the Professor as prophet and Peter as the next anointed. She thinks about that old man sometimes, feels a shiver run down her spine. He gathered a regular little cult around him, didn’t he? 

“I was there at the creation of Narnia” he’d say solemnly and they’d all gasp, hanging onto his words as if they were diamonds. He’d always had a way with words, even when they stayed at his house as children. The problem with Susan was that she thought too much, and he saw that. So she was cast as the doubter, the temptress, the icon of being led astray, the lost sheep who could still return to the fold. 

The police had come to her a few months Afterwards, set her down with a cup of tea and a biscuit, and told her they had reason to believe it wasn’t an accident and she knew.

“Fancy you believing in those silly games we played as children” she’d told them, hoping they’d realise where this had all started, notice that it had all gotten out of hand. When she went to Peter’s house to clear through his things, she’d found the letters. They’d been on their way to find these magical rings the Professor swore could transport the bearer to different worlds, and had indeed transported him. The final proof, incontrovertible evidence to Susan that the they weren’t wrong. 

Except that was why they died, wasn’t it?

They would have put those rings on their fingers and nothing would have happened. They would have known and he couldn’t let that happen, could he?

So he killed them, snuck onto that train and planted a bomb. Killed her entire family, carriages of innocents, and for what? Power over an adoring coterie of children who never escaped his grasp? 

The problem with Susan was that she thought too much.


End file.
